Plugin Customization, Updates, and Installation

To start this list, it’s very common for people to seek a custom plugin development to suit their needs.

In many cases, you will want to solve your very specific problems by hiring a developer to custom-program you a plugin.

But the two main issues here are:

1. developing a plugin from scratch will demand maintenance down the road.
2. more often than not, the cost of developing your plugin will be superior to lowering your expectations and using an already-existing one. Or you can evaluate and use a third-party service and a plugin. 

For example, for learning or e-commerce plugins, the existing email automation flows many times are quite simple.

Instead of developing a new solution to fix that, you might install an integration plugin to an external email marketing software, such as ActiveCampaign or Hubstaff, for example.

A good developer or agency will always come up with clever solutions to save money from their clients like that, instead of rushing to add more hours to their workload.

Many people will simply update their plugins once every month or every quarter.

This is a bad idea because, as mentioned before, there are small security updates that can be easily targeted by hackers. Update regularly your plugins.

You can turn on email notifications about plugin updates, so you are always on top of that. Always read your release notes and, if it’s a security update, just do it.

Unless it’s a major version change, which you might feel the need to study a little bit before updating it in case you get caught off-guard by sudden changes, there’s no point in taking too long to update your plugins.

To close this topic on plugins: beware of installing too many plugins.

While there isn’t a clear-cut number of how many plugins are too many, you can always watch your website’s performance for changes over time.

To check which plugin is causing the slowness, try running a speed test on your website, then deactivating plugins suspected to be causing the issue, then running the speed test again.